Facing the Raven

Facing the Raven

Black ink pours down this face, like tears flood this page - tears and ink, on this face, on this very page, they speak of death and loss and compassion. My companion, my friend, my Clara Oswald, taken by a raven - the Raven - and no doctor, not even the Doctor, could save her. What use is it? To breathe and gasp new air and sip stars like water - what use is it to live and be alive? No rose and no river, no pond and no temple, and no more impossible girl. My life has been a series of deaths and I wonder now, once again, why I continue to regenerate. It is a great injustice that I live, and others, who are infinitely better than I, are forced to die. My ship sails dangerous waters, and I make sure they always know, before they run away with me. They know, and yet they run, they come leaving their little lives to see time and space with me. We save lives, we save worlds - but what does any of that matter when we cannot save ourselves? Now another is gone, and I can scarcely even breathe. What use is it to be a lord of Time when all the entirety of my past and future is choking with the sands of death? And there is never any time left to stay in the present - there are things to be seen, monsters to be slayed, wars to be won. Who do I fool by calling myself the Doctor? Once I acknowledge my true nature, this Warrior will destroy the universe twelve times and then come back for the thirteenth, and yet vengeance will not be sought. I save you, and in return you take away everything from me. But I will try, I will try my very best, to reign in my tides, because demons run when a good man goes to war, because I promised not to seek revenge. Nobody else will die, she said, just because I have to die. How does that work, Clara, please do tell? How do you expect me to sit or fly past you without trying to rescue you? I am willing to kill, Clara, I am willing to break all the rules. I will wage war with this world, with myself, and watch from the skies as I see Creation burn. You know what I am capable of, and I am this close to giving in. But I have to be strong, just like you were. You brave, brave girl. I hope I can be half the Doctor you were.

UNTOUCHABLE

Untouchable

Quite ugly and distasteful, I must seem to you, with hungry eyes that will lap up every detail even in darkness, and ears that talk to the silence; I must seem so horrible, with hair that touches the mountains, and fingers that wish to devour every crevice in the past present and future that shelters secrets deeper than time. There is no hope, you say, for someone like me, around whom a sea of the thickest waters forms an immortal vortex. You say I am dirty, with morsels of stars stuck in my teeth, and feet contaminated by the sewage of many unborn races. An untouchable - because I have touched too much. 

I am shunned from your society, told to drink my wine quietly and sit in the corner of the dark abbey no one walks in. So I sit, sipping on that wine, that old, old wine, that once ran through the veins of gods, and think about how I can roar into your faces and tell you of my adventures. I think, but then slump defeated, because I realize I don't have a sword strong enough to slice through your thick skin of truth. As you suck the honeybees dry and squeeze all the milk from the cattle and drain the lifeforce of the earth, I will hide under these covers and think of better things. Now and then you will throw me a bone of nutrition, so I do not die, because you are honourable people, who have rid the world of starvation. A little child may perhaps steal into the dark abbey to observe my ways for a moment, and he will marvel at how perverse I am, and how much I stink of faraway places, and maybe try and push a tiny plump finger into my arm. He will then jump up in pain and astonishment, and will run - at the speed of light - to his parents, and tell them of how he witnessed the creature with volcanoes beneath her skin.

I hide my little vials of love - multicoloured and marvellous - beneath the folds of my heart, easy to access in case of immediate need. 

Further and further I sink into the smouldering concrete, as I struggle to keep my nose to the sky.